JOE LONG:

I think that you will do well to ditch the word “Game,” rather than everything the concept implies. 

“Games” are contests; by definition; they are less than deadly serious; they are temporary diversions. The word also carries with it the air of the professional athlete, specifically the National Basketball Association player of the late twentieth/early twenty-first century, someone who is by and large, a very poor role model, starting with his grammar (“game”, for instance, is something you “got” – or perchance, that you “don’t” or “ain’t” “got”). “Game” describes how a “playa” “plays”; and if you’re going to accept those terms, there’s little sense in excluding “ho” (word, mispelling AND general concept). 

If the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, some critical battles for civilized behavior and outlook have been lost on the playing courts, and the putting greens and so forth, of our modern America. 

A couple of years ago my wife’s Bible study group did a popluar study titled, “Lies Women Believe”; I remarked that, from the title, one expects it to be a handbook for single men. An understanding of female psychology may be developed into “game” – or used as such knowledge ought to be – not for temporary diversion or to win a mere competition, but to inform the sort of “gender realpolitik” men need, for self-defense and the restoration of normal and decent social relations.

 Laura writes:

I think that you will do well to ditch the word “Game,” rather than everything the concept implies.

I agree. 

Paul writes:

Because Game has been portrayed as a means of fornicating with as many women as possible, I have not studied it. So I am misinformed. If it means bravery, then it is good. For discussion, let’s change the name to self-confidence or confidence or bravery, perhaps the best word. This will take the bad connotation away.

Bravery is good, and boys should be taught bravery very early. They should be taught how to deal with the games (notice the lowercase) women are so very good at, as my mother warned me at some point without getting into many specifics since I thought, “That is girly talk.” She did teach me that women are much better at mind games than men, so I have avoided that, at least. In other words, don’t dwell on slights and rejection; it is what women do. So maybe Roissy (or some of his reasonable followers) has a point, if that is one of his points.

It would be excellent if women publicly would teach men how to deal with women and, equally important, how to treat women respectfully. Biology is important; so I suspect such discussion will be partially successful, at best.

Peter S. writes:

There is little to object to with regard to striving for the recovery of masculine virtue as described in this earlier post, but its association with Game is largely unconvincing.  The notion of Game has  a certain provenance, one embedded in the practice and concepts of pick-up artists and those who have taken up their concepts in the context of broader social ruminations.  The most passing familiarity with these figures will firmly establish that the love of women or inculcation of masculine virtue are very distant from the focus of their concerns.

Game cannot be disentangled from its seedier origins.  The suggestion by David Lee Mundy that certain proponents of “Game” are great philosophers of the age, while laughable, nevertheless hits upon an important point: there is a unifying philosophic understanding, as noted at the top of the previous post, that most of these proponents share – that of hedonistic nihilism. 

In this sense, the question of the legitimacy of Game is in part a metaphysical question.  If the nature of the world is without meaning, purpose or telos – and this is the official worldview for much of the contemporary West, as impossible as it is for individuals to consistently live within such an understanding – then one might as well be a hedonistic nihilist, but to speak of this in terms of virtue is pointless, since the entire notion of virtue is hollowed and denuded under such a weltanschauung.  If the nature of the world – as traditionally understood more or less consistently throughout human experience, with the exception of roughly the last two centuries in the West – is instead such that it embodies meaning, purpose and telos, then the question of virtue comes very much to the fore, but both hedonism and nihilism rightly come under grave suspicion.  It may just be possible to salvage Game within a Christian or similar context – the Social Pathologist, a traditional Catholic blogger writing on social themes, offers perhaps the best attempt at this [1,2,3,4,5] – but this assumes that Game is, or can be made to be, a neutral techne without corrupting influence upon the soul.  Such an assertion is far from demonstrated and few of the practitioners or writers on Game would lead one to the conclusion, on the basis of their own self-presentation, that this is likely to be so. 

This in turn leads once more to the question of specifically masculine virtue, or virtus.  The suggestion that Game can serve as a path to lead men back to virtue seems very much a false substitution, if not simply the masquerading of vice.  On the contrary, such a suggestion points more than anything to the poverty of the larger discussion on masculine virtue in contemporary culture, and this despite the very rich cultural treatment of the entire topic in the history of the West.  The contemporary literature treating this topic is poorer than it should be, but Waller Newell’s What is a Man?: 3,000 Years of Wisdom on the Art of Manly Virtue and The Code of Man: Love,  Courage, Pride, Family, Country can both be recommended, as can Harvey Mansfield’s Manliness.  Brad Miner’s The Compleat Gentleman might also be considered, although his treatment of gender relations is unsatisfactory.  A number of the articles of Terrence Moore are also worth review. [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]  

Proponents would no doubt quite reasonably point out that “game” serves as a kind of compensatory response to the feminist attack on masculinity and the consequent destabilization of relations between the sexes.  The social engineering of the last half century toward neutering has certainly resulted in both the unmanning of men and the unwomanning of women.  Further, female social and economic power in conjunction with female hypergamy have unquestionably weakened the sexual position of men with respect to women.  The analysis of a writer such as F. Roger Devlin, perhaps the best theorist on the breakdown of relations between the sexes [1,2,3,4 (& following)], might well be taken as essentially correct – they are unquestionably strongly compelling – yet none of this necessarily justifies the practice of Game.  It is worth noting that Devlin himself never makes such a justification despite the extensive use Game proponents have made of his writings. 

The contemporary problem of masculine virtue, that of putting chests back into men, to paraphrase the concern of C.S. Lewis, is necessarily one that exists – for those who accept a fundamentally metaphysical or religious worldview – sub specie aeternitatis, under the aspect of eternity.  It is virtue, or its lack, that forms the substance and quality of one’s soul and it is this that ultimately redounds upon the individual, for good or ill.  If a proof-text is wanted, one might consider the slightly amended words of Christ: “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world [of female sexual favor], and lose his own soul?” [KJV: Mark 8:36, Matt 16:26]  The sense of virtue – like the closely related sense of the sacred and sense of beauty – carries a distinguishing taste or tenor that is quite evident to those with even the least sensitivity.  In this light, one asks the question: does the practice of Game increase the soul in virtue?  Is the soul purified or corrupted thereby?

Laura writes:

You say Devlin has not addressed the issue of Game. He has, however, called on men not to marry, which I imagine makes him a kindred spirit in the eyes of Game hedonists.  In one of his articles, he recommends against marrying. When I mentioned this in a previous post, he wrote to me and told me that he meant that men should not marry but should remain celibate. He did not say so in that  article and I don’t know whether he has ever clearly called for celibacy. I don’t think he has. There are few in the men’s rights movement who believe marriage strikes mean total celibacy.

It would be absurd to speak of Game as if it were an all-encompassing approach to life and to manly virtue. I think the commenter Bruno put it well. At its best, stripped of its encouragement of promiscuity, what is known by the unfortunate name of Game is a form of psychological martial arts.

Bartholomew writes:

Mr. Bertonneau wrote,

“Respecting “Game,” the very name “Game” suggests insincerity and deceit.”

I don’t see how. What game can function if the players lie and cheat?

I think a better objection to the name “game” is that it suggests artificiality. The problem with referring to courtship and marriage in terms of “gaming” isn’t that it implies insincerity or deceit–a good player and a good spouse follow the rules and are honest. The problem is that unlike the rules of a game, the rules of love and marriage are 1.) real and 2.) divinely ordered. The rules of a game are 1.) artificial and 2.) by human convention.

When we treat love and marriage as a “game”, we treat it as a set of rules that we have invented and which we can therefore change at will, so long as all players of the game are amenable to the change, and the rules aren’t changed mid-game, etc.

But do even the Roissyites pretend they can change the rules of sex and love? They know they can’t. Doesn’t Roissy talk about educating young men on what is rather than what they’d like to be? Isn’t his masthead “Where pretty lies vanish” or something like that?

In other words, he’s making an appeal to the truth with his theories. OK, fine, but then he has no more business referring to sex and love as a “game” then a chemist has when referring to bomb-making. Sex, love and bomb-making are real things, with real, true, rules. You can no more change the rules governing sex than you can change the rules governing nitroglycerin. It’s just false therefore to refer to a real, immutable set of rules (reality) in the same way you’d refer to an artificial and mutable set of rules (games/play).

They need a new word. How about “reality”?

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